Finding Structure in Reddit With Text Mining and Dimensionality Reduction

(work with: Peter Akioyamen, Roberto Williams Batista, and Levi Nicklas)

The use of social media platforms has become common as individuals search for health-related information on the web. We considered posts on the internet forum reddit, related to the topic of miscarriages and investigated patterns in the content of the top one hundred posts. We use comments and posts related as a case study for information retrieval, and visual representations of interrelated groups of words and topics. These representations may be used for smart navigation systems, promoting discussion, transparency, and support pertaining to social determinants and healthcare among users on social media platforms and within online communities. An extension of these ideas can be used to study the behavioral patterns and social interactions within multi-community platforms.

This work was presented at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement a conference (sponsored by the Society for Health Systems) in February 2021, as a contributed talk in the human factors track.